Frank Maloney - Gender Reassignment

Lived over 60 years with full male privileges - CheckRose to the top of a male-dominated profession - CheckRight-wing political candidate for UKIP - CheckHomophobic public comments - CheckBelieves in family values and traditional morality - CheckBelieves in a 'female brain' (like people used to believe in a 'negro brain' and a 'Jewish brain') - Check

Nasty radical feminists are meant to be the reactionary ones but, to me, it is the transactivist movement that is conservative, homophobic and longs for the days when homosexuality was criminalised and men were men and women were women.

I would feel very sad for someone who was deeply homophobic and believed in the 'female brain' and was transitioning, because all of those are difficult things and I would worry that the combination might indicate someone who'd rather become female than live as a gay man.

He wants to be understood and recognised as a 23 yearold page 3 girl, which I find perfectly understandable, and, in the spirit of liberal feminism, I applaud his determination to rebel against the mindtrap of aging. After all, what is growing old as a woman if not the ultimate radfem plot to revolt all right thinking people?

How will it play out? He's a former member of the ruling elite who has lived all his life with those privileges. Now he's decided to pass the business onto his heirs he's also decided he wants to join a trade union because he's always felt like a worker and he was born with a working-class brain. He will express this by donning a flat cap, buying a whippet, drinking bitter and calling himself 'Len', because he knows that is what it means to be one of the workers.

Any member of the trade union who believes this is, at best, reductive appropriation and an insulting stereotype of class-struggle, and, at worst, a suspicious infiltration of the movement by one of the bosses, will be accused of bigotry and be worthy of death threats. Mostly the workers will tolerate his presence because, after all, he could still have them sacked and because they can no longer organise with one of the bosses always present.

It's often the people with the most rigid attitudes to and expectations of gender to whom transgenderism makes the most sense, isn't it?

That seems to me to be true of societies as well as individuals: e.g. women who lived (it's dying out) as celibate men in Albania. It wasn't possible to allow them to be independent, or family breadwinners as women, they had to become a man.

Other people might say they were genderqueer and not worry about what side of a gender binary they were on, but see a spectrum and incorporate different behaviours traditionally ascribed to one or other gender into a more fluid persona.

Sorry, didn't intend my post as a lecture directed at you - hope it didn't come across that way.

I think transgender but homophobic might prove to be not so much transgender the way many people are, but either someone who really, strongly doens't want to be gay, or someone who has been accused of being gay and who is lashing out as a result.

One of the tabloids gad a headline about him today - something along the lines of "My secret life as a woman nearly killed me." I am intrigued. I really want to know what his "life as a woman" consisted of. I'm pretty sure it DIDN'T consist of being sexually harrassed on a routine basis or being sexually assaulted at least once, or being subtly mocked and humiliated his whole life, or being dismissed, disregarded and disdained. That's what I think of when I think of my "life as a woman" and I'd really like to know what his version is.

Captchaos - Why is it ok for Lennox Lewis to call Kellie Frank and use the masculine pronoun for him, but not a feminist? - I've not seen what Lewis said but as he's worked with Kellie in the 'Frank days' it must be taking a lot to adjust from calling her "him" to calling her "her". If he's doing his best but getting it wrong not many Transpeople will get upset.

The name isn't at all significant, really, it just sounds very young and girly - it doesn't really fit. It just seemed amusingly at odds with what another woman of that age would be called. I guess it seems like he may not realise that while he may be able to identify as a woman, the woman will be an aul wan.

"I have had it explained by a trans*woman with a similar history that they deliberately choose macho careers as a form of denial. Sometimes, it is a way of showing their families they are "normal" and there is nothing to worry about. Sometimes, it is self-denial - if they can do these jobs then maybe they can overcome their desire to be women."

This is just so much BS. Here's a reason: men in super-macho professions are constantly, CONSTANTLY being told that being a man doesn't just involve, you know, being born male. Being "manly" in those professions requires a high and getting-ever-higher standard of masculine behavior. Eventually, men who are not completely masculinity-poisoned, who retain basic human feelings of emotional sensitivity, come to believe they must not be men, because men (in these super-macho professions) must be hypermasculinists.

A man who could be quite notably the most masculine man in a typical room might be more effeminate than 80% of his Marine Corps peers, for instance.

I don't know why people accept this narrative that 60+ year old trans people "ALWAYS" felt like women deep down. If that was the truth, are we to believe that simply none of these heterosexual autogynephilic trans males bothered "coming out" 40, 50 years ago? Funny how this stuff only seems to manifest for men after they've been in intensely male-dominated professions, but then they ret-con their entire sexual and personal histories so that they've "always been a woman."